Bundestag wants to stick to the repository search law despite missing the target
Even if the German nuclear power plants have now been shut down, the issue of nuclear waste is far from over
Source: picture alliance/dpa/Revierfoto
In a journal article, the nuclear scientist Bruno Thomausk points out the serious consequences of the decades-long delay. The financing of interim and final storage becomes questionable. The government wants to stay the course, she emphasizes.
DThe governing faction of the SPD, Greens and FDP in the German Bundestag do not want to draw any legal consequences from the massive failure to meet the target in the search for a repository. The Greens parliamentary group “stands behind the claim of finding the location with the ‘best possible safety’ for a repository,” explained the rapporteur for nuclear safety, Harald Ebner. “This goal is undoubtedly ambitious, but the national repository history and the experiences from Gorleben make this absolutely necessary so that in the end a repository site is selected for reasons of geology and not politics.”
The Federal Society for Disposal (BGE) had previously presented a “framework schedule”. Accordingly, the target date of 2031 envisaged in the Site Selection Act for the search for a repository must now be considered unrealistic. The determination of the site for a German nuclear repository for high-level radioactive waste could drag on into the 2060s.
In a still unpublished article in the international journal for nuclear technology, “atw”, the nuclear scientist Bruno Thomauske, a member of the former Federal Repository Commission, points out the serious consequences of the decades-long delay. The financing of interim and final storage becomes questionable.
New questions would also arise regarding the long-term security of the 16 German interim storage facilities. There are also problems with legal protection, intergenerational justice and public participation. Since the site selection law expressly prescribes a “self-questioning and learning process”, a “restart” of the search for a repository is consequently necessary, Thomauske suggests: In its current form, the search process must “be assessed as having failed”.
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